The lords of poverty the power, prestige, and corruption of the international aid business

LORDS of
POVERTY
The Power,
Prestige, and
Corruption
of the
International
Aid Business
GRAHAM HANCOCK

A

Tl-IE ATLANTIC MONTMLY PRESS
NEW YORK
•


Also by Graham Hancock

Journey Through Pakistan
Ethiopia: The Challenge of Hunger
AIDS: The Deadly Epidemic

Copyright© 1989 by Graham Hancock
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information
storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the
publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a
review.

First published in Great Britain in 1989 by Macmillan London Limited

Fust Atlantic Monthly Press paperback edition, January 1992
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hancock, Graham
Lords of poverty.
I. Economic assistance-Developing countries.
2. Non-governmental organizations-Developing
countries-Corrupt practices. I. Title.
338.9'1'091724
HC60.H278 1989
89-6893

ISBN 0-87113-469-1

{pbk.)

The Atlantic Monthly Press
19 Union Square West
New York, NY 10003

FIRST PRINTING



Contents
Acknowledgements

1X

Introduction

The Rain Kings

PART ONE

Masters of Disaster?

PART TWO

Development Incorporated

35

PART THREE

The Aristocracy of Mercy

77

PART FOUR

The Midas Touch

III

PART FIVE

Winners and Losers

153

X1

I

CONCLUSION Aid Is Not Help

185

References

195

Index

227



The Development Set
Excuse me, friends, I must catch my jet­
I'm off to join the Development Set;
My bags are packed, and I've bad all my shots,
I have travellers' cheques and pills for the trots.

The Development Set is bright and noble,
Our thoughts are deep and our vision global;
Although we move with the better classes,

Our thoughts are always with the masses
.

In Sheraton hotels in scattered nations,
We damn multinational corporations;
Injustice seems so easy to protest,
In such seething hotbeds of social rest.
We discuss malnutrition over steaks
And plan hunger talks during coffee breaks.
Whether Asian floods or African drought,
We face each issue with an open mouth.
We bring in consultants whose circumlocution
Raises difficulties for every solution Thus guaranteeing continued good eating
By showing the need for another meeting.
The language of the Development Set,
Stretches the English alphabet;
We use swell words like 'epigenetic',
'Micro', 'Macro', and 'logarithmetic'.
Development Set homes are extremely chic,
Full of carvings, curios and draped with batik.
Eye-level photographs subtly assure
That your host is at home with the rich and the poor.
Enough of these verses - on with the mission!
Our task is as broad as the human condition!
Just pray to God the biblical promise is true:
The poor ye shall always have with you.
Ross Coggins


Lords ofPooerty is dedicated to those senior staff at the

World Bank who illegally acquired and read my
original synopsis in the early days of this project. By
attempting from the outset to limit my access to inside
information they convinced me that the aid business
docs indeed have much to hide.


Acknuwledgements
In gathering the extensive documentation from a wide range of sources, which
was necessary before a single word of this book could be written, I am grateful
for the hard work and long hours put in by my research assistants Stan Winer,
Ruth Thorlby and- latterly- Fiona Bibby. I would also like to express my
thanks to Teddy Goldsmith, editor of The Ecologist magazine, who gave me
access to his extensive library on development and aid-related issues and who
was kind enough to read and comment on my text. Thanks also to Edward
Milner for his advice and encouragement and to my parents for their frequent
and helpful readings of the various drafts of the manuscript. Needless to say,
none of these people should be held responsible for any of the boo k's failings­
which, along with the views expressed in it, are entirely my own.
From inception to completion Lords of Pover a period ofmore than two years. My warmest gratitude is thus reserved for
my wife Carol and for my children Luke, Leila and Sean, who bore with me
throughout.

Graham Hancoclt
March1989


INTRODUCTION

THE RAIN KINGS



his book is an attack on a group of rich and powerful bureaucracies that

T have hijacked our kindness. The bureaucracies I refer to are those that

administer the West,s aid and then deliver it to the poor of the Third World in a
process that Bob Geldof once described as 'a perversion of the act of human
generosity'. 1
I want to make it clear at the outset that my attack is principally focused on
official aid organisations. Other than passing references to the disaster-relief
operations of some charities in Part One, I have deliberately refrained from
mounting an offensive against the voluntary agencies - for example, Oxfam,
Save the Children Fund and Band Aid in Britain, or Catholic Relief Services,
Operation California and Africare in the United States. I do have criticisms of
the long-term development work of almost all of these smaller 'non­
governmental' organisations; however, by and large, I believe their staff to be
well motivated and their efforts worthwhile. Furthermore, they are funded on
a voluntary basis by contributions from the general public and thus are under
considerable pressure to use properly the money they receive. They rarely do
significant harm; sometimes they do great good.
The same, however, cannot be said for official aid agencies. Whether
'multilateral' - like the World Bank - or 'bilateraJ' (USAID or Britain's
Overseas Development Administration), such agencies are financed involun­
tarily by tax-payers who are then allowed absolutely no say in how their money
is spent. Official aid also involves the transfer of very large sums of money- so
large, in fact, that the resources of the voluntary sector look puny and
insignificant by comparison. It would thus seem sensible, at the very least, for

the official agencies to be directly accountable to the public - to be 'trans­
parent', open and honest in their dealings.
This, unfortunately, is not the case. Indeed, critical study is sharply and
effectively discouraged. Those of us, for example, who wish to evaluate the
progress, or effectiveness, or quality of development assistance will soon
discover that the aid bureaucracies have already carried out all the evaluations
that they believe to be necessary and are prepared to resist - with armour­
plated resolve - the 'ignorant', or 'biased' or 'hostile' attentions of outsiders.
Even the few apparently independent studies in this field tum out in the


Lords ofPOfJ�
majority of cases to have been financed by one or other of the aid agencies or by
institutes set up with aid money. And, where there is no such direct link, more
subtle influences are generally at work. Academics at schools of development
studies, for instance, often aspire to highly-paid jobs in the United Nations or
the World Bank and can be forgiven for not biting too hard a hand that may be
about to feed them. Western journalists investigating projects in poor coun­
tries usually do so under aid-agency auspices and tend to come away with a
partisan view of what they have seen. Likewise appeals for disaster-relief,
which have played a particularly important role in shaping public perceptions
of aid issues in recent years, portray the agencies and their staffs in a light that is
entirely positive-if not actually saintly.
At a more general level, foreign aid - now worth almost $6o billion a year has changed the shape of the world in which we live and had a profound impact
on all our thinking. Consciously or unconsciously we view many critical global
problems through lenses provided by the aid industry. When we come to
analyse these problems we draw on a vast data-base that the aid industry has
generated - and that the aid industry controls. If, as individuals, we choose to
act to solve these problems then we will find that the aid industry has already
defined and determined most of the directions in which we may move.

What we have here, therefore, is a publicly-funded enterprise, charged with
grave international responsibilities, that has not only been permitted to wall off
its inner workings from the public view but that also sets its own goals,
establishes how these goals are to be attained and, in due course, passes
judgement on its own efforts. Perhaps inevitably in such a hermetically-sealed
universe, these judgements tend to be favourable and seek to reassure us that
all is well, that formidable difficulties are slowly but surely being overcome and
that aid is fundamentally good. Indeed, the promotion of such anodyne,
cheerful and uplifting messages has become a massive international exercise
employing thousands of people and absorbing public-relations budgets worth
hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
It is a tribute to the success of this PR campaign that foreign aid is now a
sacred cow. In all Western countries, irrespective of their wealth, and irrespec­
tive also of their ideological stance, 'overseas development' has been elevated
above political debate to become the 'least questioned form of state spending'. 2
Perhaps this lack of examination explains why foreign-aid budgets always
increase. The rate of expansion may be relatively slow here, relatively fast
there; in all donor countries, however-even in times of general austerity- more
gets spent on overseas development every year.
Thus, while we may cut our military spending, pare our education systems
to the bone, and put our health services under the microscope, foreign-aid
allocations regularly escape cost-benefit analysis and efforts are seldom made
to link further funding to the achievement of results in the field. As Professor
Bauer of the London School of Economics accurately observes: 'Whatever
happens in the recipient countries can be adduced to support the maintenance
or extension of aid. Progress is evidence of its efficiency and so an argument for


Introduction
its expansion; lack of progress is evidence that the dosage has been insufficient

and must be increased. Some advocates argue that it would be inexpedient to
deny aid to the speedy (those who advance); others, that it would be cruel to
deny it to the needy (those who stagnate). Aid is thus like chainpagne: in
success you deserve it, in failure you need it. '3
There is, of course, criticism of the aid industry- but such criticism tends to
be confined within a rather narrow range. Most commonly we hear the voices
of those who say that aid is insufficient and that it should be increased. Some
detractors single out specific types of aid as being inappropriate (food aid, for
example, or programme aid, or aid for the development of heavy industries).
Others focus on particular instances in which aid has been used wastefully, or
corruptly, or has gone to governments that are not politically popular in the
West. All these different criticisms have one thing in common: they fail, as
Professor Bauer puts it, 'to question aid as such'. 4
In writing Lords ofPoverty it has been my explicit purpose to do just that- to
question aid as such. In consequence, this is not a book that campaigns for more
aid; in my view, more of a bad thing can only be a worse thing. Neither is this a
boo k that argues for a redirection of aid - for example, to better-designed
projects or to more worthy countries. I do not accept that aid can be made to
work ifonly method X is used in place of method Y, ifonly this is done instead
of that, if only the political or commercial strings attached are forthwith
removed, if only the poor are properly 'targeted' rather than the better-off and so on. Such formulas, much loved by the aid industry, have about as much
intellectual validity as the facile excuses of tribal rainmakers who deny the
basic absurdity of dancing beneath the breathless sky and seek instead to
explain the failure of their efforts in terms of obscure but correctable errors in
their performance of the ritual. Like rainmakers, too, the high priests of
foreign aid are always ready to claim the credit if, by some freak coincidence,
things end up going right for a change instead of wrong.
In tribal society it is such dexterous dodging of the real issues that allows the
rainmakers to stay in business even though they don't make rain; likewise, in
Westem public-spending, the same tricks of the trade ensure that huge sums of

our money continue to be transferred to aid organisations that seldom- if ever
- produce any tangible results. Despite the fads, fancies, 'new techniques',
'new directions' and endless 'policy rethinks' that have characterised the
development business over the last half-century, and despite the expenditure
of hundreds of billions of dollars, there is little evidence to prove that the poor
of the Third World have actually benefited. Year in year out, however, there can
be no doubt that aid pays the hefty salaries and underwrites the privileged
lifestyles of the international civil servants, 'development expens', consultants
and assorted freeloaders who staff the aid agencies themselves.
Because I single out these personnel for particular vilification in Lords of
Poverty it is inevitable that some will see this book as an unprincipled attack on
a basically caring and worthy group of people. Equally, I am well aware that in
deliberately drawing attention to the unsavoury, greedy, stupid and dangerous


Lords ofPov�
aspects of the aid industry's behaviour I am swimming against the tide of
received wisdom- and in some ways being 'ungentlemanly'. What I have to say
will bitterly offend many people. I make no apologies for that. In democratic
societies, we have the right to know the whole truth about publicly-funded
institutions - rather than just the partial truths that the bureaucrats who staff
those institutions want us to know.


PART

ONE

MASTERS OF
DISASTER?

And you must know this law of culture: two civilisations
cannot really know and understand one another well. You
will start going deaf and blind. You will be content in your
own civilisation . .. but signals from the other civilisation
will be as incomprehensible to you as if they had been sent
by the inhabitants of Venus.
Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Emperor



HE

WHITE WOMAN, tired but pretty, the one in the blue paisley frock, what
exactly is she doing? Beneath the hot foreign sun, a trickle of perspiration
on her brow, busy and wan, harassed and concerned, what can she be up to?
She's measuring the circumference of black children's arms, she's weighing
marasmic babies in a sling, she's distributing high-energy biscuits to listless
and demoralised kids, she's mixing a life-saving solution of oral-rehydration
salts, she's supervising the share-out of a grain ration, she's digging a pit
latrine. She's a nutritionist or a nurse, or a construction engineer, she's a
volunteer with no particular skills or a professional with many, she's an
evangelist or an atheist, she's with Ox:fam or UNICEF, with World Vision or
the Red Cross. In 1989 she was in Mozambique, in the Sudan, in Ethiopia, and
in refugee camps along the border between Kampuchea and Tlµiland. She'd
been in all these places in 1988, too, and in 1987. She'll still be in them in 1990
and in 1991. The personification of faith and hope, delivered to developing
countries by our charity, she's to be found wherever and whenever disaster
strikes. She's the one the camera focuses on briefly ministering to cholera
victims in a field-hospital, the one the reporter gets a quote from in front of the
feeding station, the one whose weary eyes tell you that she's seen it all before

and that she expects to go on seeing it again and again and again.

T

FRIENDS IN DEED?
Western reliefworkers in Third World disasters have become potent symbols
of the fundamental decency and rightness of international aid. Of course we
must help when people are suffering, when lives are in terrible jeopardy, when
the sky falls or the earth dries up. Tight-fisted though we may be at other times,
a sudden crisis makes us kind.
Charities established to do good works amongst the poor know that they can
benefit from this powerful but transitory altruism and go into public-relations
overdrive when there is a relief operation in prospect. It's a simple fact of life in
the voluntary sector: with appropriate media hype, famines, dramatic influxes
of refugees, floods, earthquakes and other such catastrophes can be real
money-spinners.
A look at the accounts of Oxfam bears this out. After several years of
3


Lords ofPO'Derty

·

relatively slow expansion, the world-renowned British voluntary agency
doubled its takings over the period 1978-80; it achieved this through
high-pressure fund-raising for victims of famine and war in Kampuchea
following the Vietnamese invasion of that South-East Asian country in 1979.
Thereafter public donations remained fairly static until 1985 when appeals on
behalf of the starving in Ethiopia multiplied Oxfam's earnings again - to an

all-time high of £51.1 million, up from less than £20 million in 1983-4.1
Clearly, emergency relief work has a much greater capacity to mobilise
public generosity than Oxfam's more routine long-term development activi­
ties. The same holds true for other charities as well. In 1985, for example, Band
Aid raised £16 million for the starving from the British public.2 Americans
each year hand over slightly more than $1 billion to private voluntary
organisations engaged in the Third World, largely spurred on to do so by
poignant televised appeals for famine and disaster relief. All in all, voluntary
agencies like War on Want, Oxfam and Christian Aid in Britain, World Vision,
CARE Incorporated and Project Hope in the United States, and M�decins
Sans Frontieres in France, can count on a total of $2.4 billion a year in
charitable donations to finance their projects and programmes in the develop­
ing countries. 3 The international media ballyhoo surrounding the Ethiopian
famine raised this figure, albeit briefly, to almost $4 billion in 1985.4
Our support for the humanitarian endeavours of the voluntary agencies is
also reflected in opinion polls. A recent survey conducted in the United States
for the World Bank concluded that 'scepticism about government efficiency in
handling aid leads to a preference for non-governmental channels in the
distribution of aid'. 5 Likewise, in Europe, people in ten countries were asked
the question: 'Which agencies provide the most useful help to developing
countries?' Only 12 per cent of the respondents said 'the government'; 25 per
cent said 'private organisations' .6 Another US survey concluded, 'Americans
clearly favor aiding the poor countries for moral and humanitarian reasons,'
and added: 'public support is strongest to alleviate such basic problems as
hunger and malnutrition, disease and illiteracy'. 7 A United States Presidential
Commission on World Hunger established that when assistance was described
as 'aid to combat hunger' 77 per cent of Americans were in favour of
maintaining it or increasing it; however, when the question was put in terms of
'economic aid' to developing countries, support dropped to 49 per cent.
The emotional demand of mass suffering is strong and direct. It compels us

to reach for our cheque books in response to disaster appeals by the voluntary
agencies. Also - through us - it influences the behaviour of our elected
governments: although Britain and the United States have imposed a political
ban on long-term development assistance to socialist Ethiopia, both were
generous with 'humanitarian' assistance during the 1984-5 famine and again
during 1987-8.
Governments control the purse-strings of official aid budgets that dwarf the
resources available to the charities.8 It should not be forgotten, however, that
these budgets, too, are provided by 'us' - all official aid, whether earmarked for
4


Masters ofDisaster?
'long-term' or 'emergency' purposes is financed out of tax revenues. It is then
channelled to the Third World through two rather different types of organisa­
tion: 'bilateral' (for example, Britain's Overseas Development Administration
and the United States Agency for International Development) and 'multi­
lateral' (for example, the EEC's Directorate General for Development, the
World Bank and the various agencies of the United Nations system like the
Food and Agriculture Organisation, the World Health Organisation and
the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees).
Generally speaking, the more that an official agency's work can be packaged
as humanitarian and charitable in focus, the more likely it is to receive the
mandate of popular approval. One senior staffer at UNICEF (the United
Nations Children's Emergency Fund) told me that he found it both exciting
and fulfilling to be employed by an agency that had such a 'sexy' subject
matter. 'Of course most of our finances come directly to us from member
governments of the UN,' he said, 'but Joe Public gets worked up and
concerned about children in trouble; that's why people buy our Christmas
cards. We're seen as being amongst the good guys.'

The charitable impulse at the root of much aid-giving is at its most potent
during disasters and emergencies. It is, however, a double-edged sword. On
the one hand it raises lots of money. On the other it stifles questions about the
uses to which this money is put - and makes those who ask such questions look
rather churlish. Criticising humanitarianism and generosity is like criticising
the institution of motherhood; it is just not 'the done thing'. One observer has
expressed the problem particularly well:
Humanitarians ask individuals and gove�ents, out of charity, to give
funds to allow them to bind up wounds, comfort the weak, save lives.
Compassion expects everyone to agree on the method. Since they are
guided by a moral virtue, compassion, any obstacle in the path of carry­
ing out humanitarian objectives must be immoral. And since the objective
is so good, it is inconceivable that recipients will fail to be grateful. 9
But what is it, precisely, that the recipients are expected to be grateful/or?
In some cases it is a good deal less than donors and tax-payers are led to
expect. In August 1988, for example, Sudan (previously drought-stricken) was
hit by severe flooding of the River Nile and, overnight, more than a million
people were rendered homeless in Khartoum, the capital city. As the waters
continued to rise, epidemics of diseases like cholera and typhoid posed an
ever-increasing threat. In addition many of the flood victims were completely
destitute and without any kind of food or shelter. Aid agencies in the
industrialised countries responded to this disaster with strident newspaper and
television appeals for help and millions of dollars were quickly donated. Two
weeks after the flooding, however, almost no tangible signs of the relief effort
could be seen on the ground: a dozen or so plastic sheets here, a few blankets
from the Red Crescent Society there, and a grain-distribution station with just
twelve sacks of flour in hand. Visiting reporters were proudly shown a newly
s

Lords ofP(J'l)erty
erected camp of 300 tents provided by Britain: for reasons that no one on the
spot could explain, all the tents turned out to be empty and under armed guard
- even though tens of thousands of homeless people were milling about on
mudflats nearby.
By this time no fewer than eighty-five relief Bights had arrived from Europe
and the US bringing 1 ,200 tonnes of supplies. What was unfortunate was that
these consignments had included just 400 tonnes of food (against a UN
estimate of 12,000 tonnes to cover the immediate need). 'That's why, if we go
to any comer, we will find that the majority of people have received nothing,'
said Al Haj Nugdalla Rahman, a local MP. Amongst the food that was sent was
a large container-load of fresh meat which- in the absence of refrigeration quickly began to rot. By the time it was distributed it was 'really smelling'
according to one relief worker. By contrast much more durable-and necessary
- items like clothing, soap and hospital tents were almost completely missing
0
from the relief deliveries during the first two weeks. 1
Despite such failings in the crucial early days, genuine efforts were sub­
sequently made during the Sudan floods to help those in need. All too often,
however, appeals for money are not followed up by action of any practical kind.
One agency that has mastered the art of saying much and giving little is The
Hunger Project, a massive international undertaking which raises funds in the
United States, Britain and many other countries with the claim that it is
dedicated to the 'eradication of the persistence of hunger and starvation' in the
Third World;11 in fact it sends almost no money to the starving at all.
According to the US National Charities Information Bureau, The Hunger
Project received donations totalling $6,98 1 ,005 in 1985 . Out of this, $210,775
was passed on in the form of grants to other organisations involved in relief
work in hungry countries. All the rest was spent in the US under such headings
as 'enrollment and committee activities', 'communication, information and
education services', 'publications', 'management and general' and 'fund­

2
raising'. Telephone expenses for the year approached half a million dollars.1
In 1 984 The Hunger Project's British office raised £192,658 from the public of
which just £1,048 went to the Third World.13
In 1985, International Christian Aid, a large US voluntary organisation, was
accused by officials at the UN and at the State Department of failing to send a
single cent to Ethiopia out of $18 million raised for famine relief in that African
country.14 ICA denied the allegations: according to its own accounts 28 per
cent of its income is spent on fund-raising and administration in the United
States; all the rest, i.e. 72 per cent, goes to the Third World.15 However, an
investigation of the charity by an agency of the US Better Business Bureau had
previously concluded otherwise: a close analysis oflCA's expenditure for 1983
showed that just 41 per cent of its income in that year went to support the
16
programmes cited in its fund-raising solicitations. A similar example is the
Dallas-based relief organisation, Priority One International; in one year it sent
overseas just 18 cents out of every dollar that it received in donations.17
Fortunately, humanitarianism is not always the last refuge of the scoundrel.

6


Masters ofDisaster!
Figures from the Charities Aid Foundation show that most of Britain's top
twenty-one voluntary agencies only divert about 10 pence out of each pound
raised to pay for their overheads, administration and fund-raising. Band Aid
did particularly well during the Ethiopian famine of 1984-5; it kept its costs
down to just 7 pence in every £100 received. War on Want, which came under
attack in October 1986 with charges that its then Director, George Galloway,
bad spent £20,000 in eighteen months staying in luxury hotels, in fact spent

only 1. 7 per cent of its income on administration and fund-raising in 1984-5.
Save the Children Fund, with costs running at 7 .42 per cent of moneys
received in the same year, says: 'We have a policy of keeping our overheads
down to below 15 per cent of our income
We want maximum income to
give maximum aid.'18
.

FREELOADERS, FOOLS

AND

•

.

THE GOD-SQUAD

Whether the aid is charitable or official, however, whether it is funded out of
direct public donations or out of taxes, the employees of all the agencies
concerned inevitably play a crucial role in the field and bear a tremendous
responsibility.They must interpret correctly the needs of the poor and they
must meet those needs quickly and competently.
It is generally taken for granted that they do both of these things, and do
them well. Press and television reports tend to play up relief workers as
hard-pressed saints. Some recipients of emergency assistance have, however,
been heard to express ungracious doubts about those who come to help. As one
African refugee asked petulantly: 'Why is it that every US dollar comes with
twenty Americans attached to it?'19
In many Third World disasters, a great deal of aid money is spent purchasing

the expertise that Americans - and Europeans - provide. According to a
detailed study of refugee relief in South-East Asia:
The agencies' 'operating', 'logistics' and 'miscellaneous' costs are enor­
mous and almost impenetrable. Each agency calculates them on a
different basis. Somewhere among them are the considerable costs of
personnel. The International Commission of the Red Cross treats its staff
superbly. In Phnom Penh much of their food was imported from
Europe; in Thailand UN officials constantly complained that the Swiss,
with their air-conditioned cars, their weekends on the beach, lived far
better than anyone else ... One World Health Organisation official
asked for a fee of $50,000, a generous per diem, and a ticket for his wife,
to come for a short assignment to Phnom Penh. Eventually he compro­
mised on $16,000, the per diem, and no wife .. UN officials would get
more iii two days' allowances than the relief programme would provide
for the average Cambodian over a twenty-seven-month period. 20
.

The aid personnel who consume these resources come in all shapes and
sizes, all kinds and varieties. Some are very good indeed - and undoubt7


Lards ofPOfJerty

edly earn their pay. Others are extraordinarily bad, their motivation is
questionable and their input is negligible or even harmful. All too often, during
Third World disasters, staff, experts and consultants are not subjected to any
kind of careful scrutiny before they are sent into the field; common sense gets
abandoned in the rush to help.
It should be said at the outset that much of this help is barely tangible to the
victims of the catastrophe. Many Western 'disaster experts' turn out to be

merely on expensive fact-finding missions. What this means in practice is that
they arrive with empty hands and leave with their heads full of information
which may, or may not, later be translated into action. At the height of the
Sudanese drought in February 1985 the Khartoum Hilton (where a single
room costs $150 a night without breakfast) seethed with delegations which had
come 'to assess the situation'. Despite critical water shortages in many pans of
the country, and despite the fact that the devastating extent of the emergency
had been thoroughly assessed over the preceding four months, not one
additional drilling rig had by then arrived.21
Worse than this, as an anthropologist who spent several years living amongst
African refugees has observed: 'During an emergency, whatever their back­
ground, almost any white face which arrives on the scene has the chance of a
job.'22
I came across an example of the accuracy of this remark during the famine
that afflicted the East African country of Somalia in 1987. In charge of one
highly reputable British voluntary agency's emergency ·feeding operations
there I found a bronzed globe-trotter whose only qualification for the position
appeared to be the fact that he had an African wife (she was not a Somali but he
employed her in the field anyway, causing massive resentment amongst locally
recruited staff who rightly believed they could do her job better). He told me
that the agency had first taken him on to its payroll in Ethiopia, which he had
been visiting as a tourist in 1985 ('piece of luck, that'). Later he had been
transferred to a more senior position in Tanzania-where he was keen to return
as soon as possible since that was where his wife came from. When I expressed
my doubts that he could be of much use to anyone in Somalia - which he had
never visited before and claimed to dislike intensely - he reasstlred me that he
was only there on a short-term secondment. His absolute lack of any relevant
technical experience (he'd studied philosophy at university) was thus com­
pounded by a sublime ignorance of Somali conditions and customs.
In Somalia again, but some years earlier, International Christian Aid, World

Vision and a number of other US charities wasted valuable donor dollars by
recruiting Christian zealots to manage their programmes in the refugee camps
that had been set up following fighting along the border with Ethiopia. In
addition to antagonising and outraging the Muslims amongst whom they
worked, these people were generally young, untrained and inexperienced.
Robert Smith, a born-again World Vision official in Somalia, caused puzzle­
ment - and some hilarity - amongst suppliers of equipment and materials by
signing all his requisition telexes with the words 'God Bless Robert'. 23 The
8


Masters ofDisaster?
extent to which God complied is not known. What is clear, however, is that
requisitions from the US charities were frequently wasteful and badly thought
out. ICA had a penchant for constructing shelters with imported materials that
were not properly treated with insecticides - most of them collapsed on their
occupants after being weakened by termites. According to one ICA nurse, who
resigned in disgust: 'The camp managers were completely untrained in this
kind of business. Some of them appeared to place a higher priority on
evangelising than on administering to the refugees' physical needs. '24
Many other crass errors were made as a result of putting evangelism before
good management. For example, one of the American agencies ordered

$ 100,000 worth of equipment and supplies for the camps, and then cancelled

when - rather belatedly - it was realised that the relevant budget was badly
overspent. What was much worse was that the Christian staff involved in this
snafu chose to make additional savings by suddenly cancelling their ongoing
work in the health sector - including all the vital booster shots in the second
stage of an inoculation campaign which had made initial rounds in eleven

camps. Thousands of children in whom the immunisation process had been
started but not completed were thus rendered more susceptible to deadly
epidemics than they would have been if they had simply been left alone. 25
Whenever religion is mixed injudiciously with relief work there are human
costs to be paid. Despite ample evidence of this, however, the onward march of
Christianity remains an abiding concern of many voluntary agencies. Accord­
ing to Ted Engstrom, who was President of World Vision until 30 June 1987:
'We analyse every project, every programme we undertake, to make sure that
within that programme evangelism is a significant component. We cannot feed
'
individuals and then let them go to hell. 26
During 1980-1 this policy led to grave charges being levelled against the
giant American charity's refugee programme in Honduras, which was being
carried out under the overall direction of UNHCR (the branch of the United
Nations mandated with international responsibilities for refugees). The
charges, most of which were strenuously denied, came from other relief
workers on the spot. According to these witnesses, World Vision employees
frequently used the threat of withholding food supplies to coerce Salvadorean
refugees into attending Protestant worship services. It was also alleged- and
again denied - that World Vision employed several ex-members of the local
secret police (DNI) and had a policy of allowing the Honduran military free
access to the refugee camps that it administered. The most serious accusation
was that, on the night of 22 May 1981, two Salvadorean refugees who sought
sanctuary at the Honduran village of Colomoncagua were picked up by World
Vision, installed in a vehicle and told that they were being taken to the refugee
camp at Limones. Instead they were handed over to the military. A few days
later the same two refugees were found dead at the border.27 World Vision
once again denied involvement in these events.

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